Alas, poor Melvyn Roffe.
The recently appointed principal of George Watson's College, one of Edinburgh's most popular independent schools, was probably unaware of the resentment his recent comments about Scottish literature would arouse. The former English teacher criticised compulsory testing on Scottish texts in the Curriculum for Excellence, suggesting "mandatory texts are likely to reduce the scope of pupils' understanding of literature when we should be broadening the scope of their understanding and encouraging them to read very widely".
When Roffe added that "in the past few weeks, I have heard more about Robert Burns's role in romantic literature than ever before" he well and truly laid down the gauntlet. To the restless dead can now be added the exasperated living, who are growing weary of having to defend the country's heritage of world-class writers.
Formerly headmaster of a state school in Norfolk, and before that in Wales, Roffe most likely did not hear much about the Bard among his colleagues. Ignorance of Scottish literature is, after all, widespread. Yet to infer that hearing Burns's name so often since his arrival in Edinburgh is a sign of jingoism or special pleading is more than a little offensive. Academics across the world, from Toronto to Johannesburg, recognise Burns's genius, and acknowledge his influence has been incalculable.
Yet where I would take greatest issue with Roffe and naysayers like him is not over his opinion about the worth of any individual writer, but the belief that there is something intrinsically narrow, parochial and inferior about Scottish literature. "In any culture," he says, "we must be proud of its distinctiveness but we must also be very aware of its role in global literature. There has got to be a balance with preparing pupils for English courses at universities across Europe and the world."
The implication is that reading too much Scottish literature would be a handicap, and that pupils need to have absorbed work from a host of other English-speaking countries to have any hope of properly appreciating books. Such an outlook implies that if a child were reared solely on Dunbar and Henryson, Stevenson and Spark, Scott and Burns, Grassic Gibbon and Kelman, they would be at a severe disadvantage when faced with the rest of world literature. Yet, while nobody would wish to deprive anyone of the glories of Shakespeare or Milton, Woolf or Waugh, for the sake of argument a wholly Scottish education would nevertheless equip them fully to comprehend any writer. Good books are good books, wherever they come from, and what one learns from literature is the same whether it is a Hebridean poem or a novel from the Steppes.
The growing insistence on global reach is worrying, especially when it relates to something that depends so closely on its origins for its flavour and power. When it comes to fine writing, a book's international appeal is irrelevant. Nor can one fool oneself that by reading a foreign book one actually understands it. Think how many classics in their original language are never translated: not because they are not excellent, but because they would not be comprehensible to other cultures.
The aim of studying English is presumably to understand the art forms of fiction, drama and poetry. If that's the case then making the connection between where and when the words were written, and the shape this imposed on them, is every bit as important as learning about other countries, and how people live.
Otherwise, what can one hope to learn from an English course? Is its purpose to tick off the big cats of the canon, or enjoy peering through a keyhole into foreign lives? Or is it to explore how writers think and create? In other words, is it a form of armchair anthropology, or an education in aesthetic expression?
Considering how many graduates in English in this country know virtually nothing of our literature, one suspects that ingrained imperialism and a love of the exotic remain the arbiters of what is most worthy of attention. Those who disdain Scottish books will no doubt continue to teach them as if they were a spoonful of medicine, sweetened by the promise of something more palatable tomorrow.
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